Have a question for one of the smartest men on the planet? Mark your calendar: on Monday July 27th at 8am ET, Stephen Hawking will be taking questions from the public in his first ever Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). If you can't make it Monday, don't worry about it, he'll be answering questions for over a week -- a first for the forum's Q&A community.

Steve Huffman's going to reveal Reddit's new content policy tomorrow, but one of his predecessors is promising that it'll be a "purge." Yishan Wong, who ran the site between 2012 - 2014 and has spoken in support of Ellen Pao, has decided to "declassify a lot of things," airing plenty of dirty laundry in the process. Wong points to discussions he had with Huffman during his tenure, saying that the co-founder was previously unconcerned with protecting free speech and was blasé about censoring racist, sexist and homophobic threads. He goes onto quote Huffman as saying that "I don't think there's a place for such things on Reddit," giving you a clue as to the tone of tomorrow's AMA.

Reddit has been a bit of a mess lately. With the firing of a popular employee Victoria Taylor, unpaid moderators shutting down subreddits, and interim CEO Ellen Pao "leaving" and being replaced by co-founder Steve Huffman, it's not exactly business as usual at the self-proclaimed "front page of the internet." Now the company is trying to figure out how to deal with some of the more horrible portions of the site with an AMA set for July 16th at 4PM ET. In the announcement about the upcoming event co-founder Steve Huffman talked about some of the more loathsome portions of the site, "there is also a dark side, communities whose purpose is reprehensible, and we don't have any obligation to support them. And we also believe that some communities currently on the platform should not be here at all." Considering how touchy the community can be when faced with changes, this should be interesting.

Senior members of Google's public policy team took to Reddit today to discuss the company's stance on government surveillance reform and the pending expiration of Section 215 of the Patriot Act that allows for the bulk collection of phone records. Google's director for law enforcement and information security, Richard Salgado and David Lieber, its senior privacy policy counsel took part in the discussion. Judging by the responses, the AMA didn't start as smoothly as they probably hoped. The very first answer about Google being hacked by individuals in China in 2009 seemed extremely canned and prompted the reply, "that is a non-answer. Did the PR team type it up for you?" After that, the answers got a bit more genuine.

Reddit is about to host a lot more than links and comments. The social site is launching a dedicated team that will produce original video content. It'll initially focus on bringing the spirit of Ask Me Anything sessions to video, but it'll eventually look at covering stories from subreddits and individual users -- if you've seen the "Explain Like I'm Five" adaptation, that's a hint at where Reddit is going. It's hard to tell if this will click with a community that's more about impromptu discussions than slick presentations, but Reddit is clearly willing to find out whether or not there's money to be made in moving pictures.

Last night an apparently refreshed model of Google's Chromecast streaming dongle popped up in FCC filings (as pointed out by Zatz Not Funny), just like the original did in March last year, but don't get too excited. Unfortunately, the documents don't show any real difference that we could find, and missing features like support for 5GHz WiFi will still be absent whenever the H2G2-2A hits the streets. Need more confirmation? Six members of the Chromecast team took part in a coincidentally-timed AMA on Reddit this afternoon, and according to Google Jacky Hayward "we don't have any new user-facing features planned for this device." Whatever changes there are in the new model "it will have the same features as the original and most users won't notice a difference."

Reddit's Ask Me Anything (AMA) interviews with celebrities run the gamut from stellar to ugly, but they're usually entertaining -- and there's now a dedicated app. That means you won't have to wade through the site's copious content to find interviews with the likes of Aaron Paul (above) or Bill Gates. You can choose hot, recent or all-time popular AMAs, then see a description of the interviewee. From there, you can narrow it down to just questions that were answered, or see every question posed. Reddit told Variety that it's trying to be more proactive in marketing features like AMA, rather than solely relying its (formidable) organic growth. For instance, the AMA's recent explosion in popularity was due in large part to an impromptu session by President Obama. The AMA app is now available for iOS and should be hitting Android next week.

Bill Gates plays bridge, washes dishes each night and prefers In-N-Out to McDonald's and Burger King (as any sane person would). The Gates Foundation chairman offered up those tidbits and more in another Reddit AMA today, an hour-long dialogue that unearthed a few gems.

Let's consider the Microsoft situation. We already knew Gates would play a more prominent role in the company now that Satya Nadella is running the show, and he confirmed that he's going to spend about one-third of his time on "product work" for the company. Pretty vague stuff, but he clarified just a bit:

"I make sure we pick ambitious scenarios and that we have a strong architecture to deliver on them. I encourage good work (hopefully)."

You know what's not new? Android games. You know what is new? Games for Google Glass. There has been the odd attempt so far, but french-based game developer AMA is porting one of its bonafide titles over to the small screen for real. Escape! is a simple puzzler, the sort that we're all familiar with on our phones, that is being squeezed into the wearable format. While games on the hardware might be something of an inevitability, we managed to get our eyes inside a pair to take a better look for ourselves. Head past the break to see how it worked out.

Ever wonder who made the call to not pursue the Courier? Or, why did Microsoft kill off the Kin so quickly? Maybe looking for someone who can tell you whether the post-PC era is really a thing? Here's your chance. Bill Gates is currently doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit, which, as the name implies, gives you the chance to get your questions answered. Get your best inquiry prepared and hit up the source link -- but don't get too excited. In just 45 minutes Gates' post has already received 4,400 responses, meaning you might have a bit of a wait before he gets to that most important question: yours.

Update: Video of Bill answering the first few questions added after the break.

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Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:30:00 -050021|20457011http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/09/sprints-big-surprise-to-be-unlimited-calling-data-text-and-m/%3Futm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%26ncid%3Drss_semi
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/09/sprints-big-surprise-to-be-unlimited-calling-data-text-and-m/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/09/sprints-big-surprise-to-be-unlimited-calling-data-text-and-m/%3Futm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%23comments
We can't say we expected Sprint to actually surprise anyone with its "game changing" announcement tomorrow, and right on schedule, the details have come leaking out. Apparently Sprint's $70 rate plan going unlimited, meaning seven Hamiltons will get you endless mobile-to-mobile calling (to any network, not just Sprint), texts, data, and MMS -- stuff you could already get on the Simply Unlimited plan, but the big change at this price point is the unlimited mobile-to-mobile voice, up from 450 minutes in the current plan. Yeah, it's a good deal, but is it a revolutionary deal? We'd say that all depends on whether or not it comes with a free Palm Pixi.

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Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:40:00 -040021|19156418http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/09/sprints-big-surprise-to-be-unlimited-calling-data-text-and-m/%3Futm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%26ncid%3Drss_semi
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/09/sprints-big-surprise-to-be-unlimited-calling-data-text-and-m/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/09/sprints-big-surprise-to-be-unlimited-calling-data-text-and-m/%3Futm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%23comments
We can't say we expected Sprint to actually surprise anyone with its "game changing" announcement tomorrow, and right on schedule, the details have come leaking out. Apparently Sprint's $70 rate plan going unlimited, meaning seven Hamiltons will get you endless mobile-to-mobile calling (to any network, not just Sprint), texts, data, and MMS -- stuff you could already get on the Simply Unlimited plan, but the big change at this price point is the unlimited mobile-to-mobile voice, up from 450 minutes in the current plan. Yeah, it's a good deal, but is it a revolutionary deal? We'd say that all depends on whether or not it comes with a free Palm Pixi.

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Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:40:00 -040021|19156414http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/10/the-v-code-boatloads-of-data-via-barcode/%3Futm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%26ncid%3Drss_semi
http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/10/the-v-code-boatloads-of-data-via-barcode/http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/10/the-v-code-boatloads-of-data-via-barcode/%3Futm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%23comments
Remember the good ol' days when you could count on your barcodes to be nothing more than a handful of straight lines? Those days were long gone once the whole 2D barcode craze swept the industry (look at pretty much any package that's been shipped to you to see what we mean), and now we've taken one more step down the slippery slope of complexity with the introduction of the "V-Code" from MobileAMA. The basic idea is to animate a 2D barcode, significantly growing the size of data that can be represented -- throw a cameraphone into the mix, and you can probably see where they're going with this. MobileAMA would like to see users get their ringtones, wallpapers, and other garden variety phone knickknacks using their V-Codes, though with carriers generally doing a decent job offering content to their subscribers and Bluetooth becoming virtually ubiquitous, we think they've probably got an uphill battle on their hands.